The book 100 Suns has excellent photos of 100 tests. Sadly. the image gallery doesn’t seem to be available online just now, but the book is very impressive.
I’m never going to be able to look at the mariachi guys in my favorite Mexican restaurant the same way again.
[Harry Connick, Jr.]
Holy God.
[/Harry Connick, Jr.]
Best post of the month, and possibly the year.
Translation please? 
I’ve said this exact thing over and over again, but nobody will listen to me. 
< ¡Grito de alegría! >
Well, Kruschev claimed that Russia had actually deployed a 100 megaton weapon—which the 57 megaton Tsar was a scaled-down version of—in East Germany in 62, but that might have just been commie bluster. Good information on the details of the Russian nuclear program is somewhat hard to come by, compared to western programs.
However, this page on the nuclear weapons archive (which also has some nice footage of the Tsar test) quotes sources as saying that the Russians deployed a weapon with a 50 megaton maximum yield, that was tested at about half yield.
I visited the Atomic Testing Museum just last week. They had an interesting book on sale in the gift shop: How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb.
If you’re interested in such things, the museum is well worth a visit.
I am just going from memory here, as I can’t find any evidence in a quick search, but I recall hearing that the first A bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a chase plane following to capture the explosion. But the camera malfunctioned, so there is no eyewitness motion picture available. Any truth to this?
Absolutely incorrect. Clip from aforementioned Trinity and Beyond; actual Little Boy footage begins at about 0:53.
The Tsar Bomba was indeed designed to have a yield of 100MT. Its a bit technical, but it was a 3-stage H-bomb and had they used Uranium as a tamper for the third stage instead of Lead the yield would have doubled from 50 to 100. However it would have also been incredibly dirty. Estimates say the one bomb with the Uranium tamper would have increased the entire world’s nuclear fallout by 25%.
Aside from there being some other footage, you’re correct.
The plan had been that the photographic record of the explosion would be provided by a high-speed Fastax camera in the third plane (V-91, later to be renamed the Necessary Evil) operated by the physicist Bernard Waldman. Fastex cameras, which had been used successfully at the Trinity test, ran at nearly 10,000 frames a second, but would rip through an entire film cannister in about 3 second. There was thus an elaborate radio signalling system from the bomb to allow the plane to be in the correct position and Waldman to be able to trigger the camera at the right moment. That all went smoothly, but when the film was developed it was discovered that there was some unknown problem with the emulsion and there was nothing to see. It’s sometimes suggested that the problem was mechanical and even that EMP had interfered with the camera, but Waldman was clear that it was the film in postwar interviews.
The successful footage of the explosion was thus not officially planned and was taken by Harold Agnew in the Great Artiste. Indeed the whole successful photographic record of the explosion was essentially taken unofficially - not that there were any objections to people taking cameras along and several took their own simple amateur ones. (Nor to forget the rare handful of photos of the mushroom cloud taken from the ground.)
And there was there no better luck in getting Fastax footage at Nagasaki. Waldman’s equivalent on the Big Stink was to be Robert Serber (with William Penney and Leonard Cheshire accompanying him as observers). But due to a screw-up over parachutes, Hopkins the pilot threw Serber off the plane immediately before takeoff. With Hopkins carrying on regardless, Tinian was reduced to getting Serber to unsuccessfully trying to explain how to work the camera over the radio. The screw-ups continued and the plane was eighty miles from Nagasaki at detonation and so didn’t arrive until ten minutes afterwards. Hence no Fastax footage.
After the failure at Hiroshima, Waldman made sure that several crew members on the second mission had handheld cine cameras to provide backups. That included Albert DeHart, the tailgunner on Bockscar and the only person on the plane facing the target when the bomb went off. I believe it’s him that took the familiar clip of the Nagasaki blast.
Speaking of said clip—how much more footage of the explosion/aftermath did he manage to shoot? The Trinity & Beyond clip with the rising mushroom cloud (and, if you look closely, what appear to be glowing splotches of orange on the ground. Yikes.) is one of the longest I’ve seen, and it’s only a couple of seconds long.
I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s about it.
That said, there’d have been the best part of a minute after detonation during which Bockscar would have been flying roughly directly away, giving DeHart an uninterrupted view. It was only then, after the shock waves had reached them, that Sweeney would have turned the plane about to give the rest of the crew a chance to see what they’d done. They didn’t then hang around much, given that they were running low on fuel.